Judith Ivory

by Black Silk

  I hope you will demonstrate your forgiveness by allowing me to visit you next week. I will be in London on Tuesday to take the surviving twin home. Please say I can stop by on my way into the city.

  Enclosed is a small token of my sincere regrets. They are for your wonderful straw hat.

  Sincerely,

  Graham

  Morrow Fields, 28 August

  My dearest Cousin,

  The ribbons are lovely, though completely unnecessary. It is the easiest thing for me to forgive you. I too said things of which I am not very proud. The truth is, it was not the sun or anything else. We were both the victims of a kind of false intimacy bred of circumstances which, now that I reflect, are somewhat familiar to me: You were needing a little understanding. I should have known better. At St. John’s, it used to happen with some regularity. Henry would yell at some poor disciple or other. The poor lad would come to me. I would listen, help him reinterpret. He would be angry that Henry hadn’t said things my way to begin with, then terribly, terribly grateful that I had. I used to—if I may be so candid—turn away sexual offers on the average of two or three students a year. What was so difficult was that I was so close to their ages. These young men never understood, but Henry, when I would confide, did. He used to laugh about it, a little nervously, I might add. He always teased me that there would one day be one I simply wouldn’t want to tell him about. But there never was.

  Please don’t think I am drawing broad parallels between you and callow university men. You are certainly much more worldly and mature, which is why I was so much more flattered—and, I think, so much more shortsighted than irritated over what I had encouraged.

  With regard to your proposed visit, I have given the idea careful consideration and find—no matter how much I might wish it otherwise—your traveling here again is simply inadvisable. I ask you instead to please refrain from coming to Morrow Fields, where I seek only solace and peace. I think perhaps we have said all that really needs to be said between us. Believe it or not, I am glad to have had your somewhat unorthodox observations and opinions of Henry. These have helped me to define more clearly and more realistically my own conclusions, be they so very different from your own.

  Please believe I harbor no grudge and will cheerfully greet you, should we meet by chance.

  Your respectful cousin,

  Submit

  Netham, 29 August

  Dearest Cousin,

  If you will not allow me to visit you, please reconsider coming to Netham. There are forty-seven people here at present—a host of chaperones. You would be a welcome addition. Rosalyn asks after you and would love to see you again.

  Affectionately,

  Graham

  Morrow Fields, 30 August

  Dear Cousin,

  My thanks for your kind invitation. I regret that I shall not be able to come to Netham this summer. Thank you for thinking of me.

  Yours truly,

  Submit Channing-Downes

  Correspondence plagued the month of August, it seemed. Submit received a letter from Tate, detailing in writing some of the difficulties he was encountering with William’s lawsuit. The worst seemed to be that the other side had found a case of precedence. A bastard son a dozen years ago had been given the status of a younger son during his father’s lifetime. Then the older son died with the father in a train accident. Voilà. There was at least one country baron in Kent who came of illegitimate birth. Of course, this was a very long way from refuting a perfectly good will that laid things out in a very different manner.

  Submit also received a letter from William decrying much the same point, but in broader, more threatening terms. Then there were the letters from Graham Wessit, at first consoling and flattering, then irritatingly persistent.

  His first letter had eased something. The thought of Graham thinking of her with nothing but contempt had left Submit feeling surprisingly discontented. Despite their rough parting, he remained in her mind. Over the course of the last weeks he had become an astute companion with whom she talked about a number of things, if not always calmly, at least meaningfully. His letter of apology brought a kind of relief, a reprieve. She could envision his liking her still, even admiring her. How strange that she should want this, she thought; but she admitted to herself she did. Just as she admitted to herself that it was only courting disaster to allow him to think they could be friends. They disagreed on too much. He was a paradox. Genuinely a gentleman one moment, then shockingly crude the next. She couldn’t sort him out. Better she didn’t try, she thought; better they cease their struggle for a friendship that was in fact impossible.

  The most interesting correspondence came at the end of the first week in September. It was from a stranger, a man she had never heard of, let alone met.

  Submit turned the brown business envelope over several times, puzzling over it. It had arrived with a large grey box. When she opened the envelope, a letter unfolded, and a slip of paper dropped out. It was a bank draft for twenty-eight pounds, in her name. She let out a little gasp of pure delight. It was enough money to pay her room and board at the inn for a dozen weeks. She bent her attention to the letter with avid interest.

  Madam,

  My sincerest sympathies with regard to the death of your husband, the Marquess of Motmarche. I lament with you his passing, especially as he was in the process of writing a most impressive work. Enclosed you will find the balance owed for that which he completed; we are now current to date.

  I now write to further suggest, if I may be so bold, that perhaps I could do you a good turn in your time of quiet mourning and that perhaps you could do me one as well. I have included here with this letter a box of notes and papers that your husband sent to me when he realized the sad state of his health. They represent what would have been the end of the book he was working on. It seems possible that a gentlewoman with the time, breeding, and long exposure to the articulate style of your good, departed husband might be able to make sense of these bits of paper to the point of finishing the work yourself. Of course, I would be pleased to compensate you for your efforts, as befits the dedication of a wife who takes it upon herself to finish what was so important to her husband and the obligation he made before his death.

  I present my condolences and compliments to Your Ladyship, the Marchioness of Motmarche, and in submitting my request await your further instructions.

  I have the honor to remain, madam,

  Your most obedient servant,

  William Task Pease, publisher

  Porridge Magazine

  The box was full of notes in several shades of ink, on all different sizes and scraps of paper, some faded with age, some new. Some of it looked like the remnants of a diary. The contents of the box were a wild confusion, much more disorganized than Henry usually was. As she laid out all the slips of paper, in their very familiar hand, she felt a tremor run through her. There was almost a kind of fervor to the quantity, the bulk and disorder, the scribbles that ran to the end of a page then up the margin and around. When had Henry done all this? And under what sort of mad inspiration?

  Tucked at the side of the box, in a tied, neat bundle, were a stack of magazines. Again the name, Pease’s Porridge. A note, in the same handwriting as the letter, was attached to these: “You will find the first dozen episodes your husband did, here entitled The Rake of Ronmoor.”

  It took all the rest of that day to glance through the printed episodes. The source of Henry’s inspiration became obvious: joy. The story—it was a little fiction!—was wonderful. It was fun, exciting, silly in a way Submit had never dreamed Henry’s imagination could run.

  No one would have thought it possible! one recent number read. In public, Ronmoor danced the young girl out, in full view of her mother and a hundred other guests. The girl seemed in a dream, under a spell, as she most surely was. Ronmoor that night was the devil himself. He swirled her round the room, past dukes and viscounts and admirals, never letting a more appropriate partne
r claim even a dance.

  By the end of the evening, people’s whispers had grown bold. The girl herself looked as though she might faint. Yet never did she take her eyes off the face of the notorious young scoundrel. Her expression was blissful, the look of a kind angel who saw a sinner to save.

  Then, in the middle of the dance floor, the sinner had the audacity to press his vile lips onto the angel’s as-yet-unkissed mouth! The music stopped. The girl’s mother stood up from her chair. Surely, this will tell the tale, the reader must think! The young innocent will awaken with that kiss, as the dazed Sleeping Beauty, and see she is dealing with no prince!

  But nay! Right does not always win! The mother threw the knave out. And the daughter rushed upstairs in tears. Of embarrassment, people whispered that night. But of passion, it was said later. For the little angel had developed a deadly appetite for the likes of the Rake of Ronmoor.

  That evening, when she met him in the garden, she said nothing again, when his audacity led him to lift the delicate eyelet of her cambric petticoat and touch his hand up the smoothness of one pink silk stocking….

  “Henry! My word!” Submit said aloud. But she kept reading. This was very cheeky stuff.

  …up the smoothness of one pink silk stocking to the garter that came from Brussels, with its copious layers of fine, feminine, sweet Belgium lace.

  Three discreet asterisks were left. Then a single sentence:

  The cad wore her garter on his sleeve as he rode home!

  Submit felt herself grow warm. Lo and behold! Henry’s magazine fiction was not only playful and inventive, it was vaguely naughty as well! Though he had some of it a bit wrong, she thought. What was all this Belgium lace and silk stocking business? Followed by a little sermon after that? Submit frowned. When a woman’s virtue was in the balance, she supposed, an author had to make the moral point. Dickens did. So did Thackeray and Lever. So did they all. But Submit knew how the young woman felt. That was what she could add, if she were to write these….

  She was contemplating doing what this Mr. Pease asked. And, partly, it was Graham Wessit goading her on. She had passion. And she was not wedded to Henry’s memory. She could riffle through Henry’s notes and strike out from them on her own. Submit even considered, looking at all the notes and the published pages, that she might have been mistaken about Henry himself. He had certainly left behind a body of prose which was fearlessly passionate in its way. The more she looked and spread things out, the more Submit could feel a new kind of excitement welling up. There was something here—things that drew her in, things she would do differently, things she had never dreamed of doing in her life—to which Henry, in the largest way, had given his secret imprimatur. The idea of exploring what was here began to fill her with heart-pounding, trembling delight.

  It took another hectic day and a half to get the gist of the notes. The notes themselves were less wonderful, stopping and starting through a jumble of half-written scenes and phrases of description. Some of it couldn’t even be followed, the writing was so offhand and quick. Henry’s notes heralded a lot of work, if she were to stick to Henry’s plan. They were also a bit overdone. Henry seemed to be hammering a point home. Submit picked up a pen.

  The very first scene was incredible fun. It was play! Great play! She discovered she loved moving the wonderful blackguard around. Clever, clever Henry! She could make fictional creatures do all the things she might like but never have the courage—or stupidity—to try. She could lambaste the rake for his cheek, reward him, rebuke him, lay him out flat, then draw him up, back to life again, like a puppet on a string. Only it was much more fun than a puppet: The only limiting aspect was the thread of her own imagination.

  By the end of the week, she had sent the first episode off—and received a prompt payment with a sincere, effusive letter of thanks in the mail. Henry’s trust account for her, she called it, as she tucked the second draft into her pocket. Hang William. Hang them all. Her future was secure. She could even begin to pay a little to Arnold Tate.

  Submit wrote her way into the next week, staying up much too late, sometimes forgetting to eat. But she had found something to do, something that set her on some course at last, and it felt positively grand. She even found herself using some of her observations of one of the more interesting men she knew, Graham Wessit. She disguised these details, of course; she wouldn’t want to offend. Then again, he probably would never read such a thing. Still, Graham Wessit did somehow remind her a little of the fictional rake….

  Chapter 25

  Getting Submit to Netham turned out to be not nearly so difficult as Graham had imagined: Tate brought her.

  At the beginning of September, Graham was in London, tying up the last of the loose ends regarding the legal status of his new little ward. While there, he went by Tate’s chambers to make sure there was nothing the counselor might add, nothing that Graham’s solicitors might have overlooked. He and Tate had ended up talking about what seemed to be a magnet topic of interest for them both, the “unhealthy and reclusive aloofness” of the lovely Widow Channing-Downes. Graham had mentioned in passing that he had invited Submit to visit his summer estate.

  He could only speculate as to how this notion took root in Tate’s mind, matured, then yielded fruit. But Submit arrived at Netham a week later, escorted by the barrister, Graham suspected, quite possibly for the unaltruistic motive of wanting a place to take her that would be removed from circles that included Mrs. Tate.

  Graham knew the attorney to be taking a great deal of personal interest in the young widow. Besides Tate’s preoccupation with her “remoteness,” Graham suspected he was handling her court proceedings as a “favor to her husband,” that is to say, for little or no material compensation. Graham knew Tate had taken her to dinner once in London then sent his own doctor to the inn the next day, because the widow had developed a chill and sneezed. (Ah, the tight circles of London. Tate’s doctor was also Graham’s own, taking care of the remaining little twin, who had developed diarrhea. The doctor was staying at Netham Hall for the weekend.) It seemed that Arnold Tate was in full magnetic attraction to the widow’s latent charms.

  And he must have been feeling the pull rather strongly, for he descended his little carriage that morning with a look of marked imbalance—the discomposure of a person whose feet, now sliding uncertainly, had been planted wholly in his own self-righteousness. Arnold Tate, it occurred to Graham, was coming to know that sin had less to do with moral pitfalls than clay feet, and he seemed shaken by the knowledge. For, as he squinted against the sunlight, offering his hand toward the open carriage door, his eyes rose disconcertedly up the high chimneys of Netham Hall. Then a white hand settled into his, and the widow appeared. Stepping down beside him, she looked serene, the picture of unassailable peace—a madonna. Perhaps that was part of Tate’s problem. Next to Submit, anyone looked a sinner.

  Whether or not Submit liked Tate’s attention, she seemed to put up with it with a stoic patience that Graham suspected came from a history of obliging mentoring old men. She allowed him to think she would be put wherever he guided her. And that September afternoon, he guided her by the elbow up the steps of Netham Hall.

  By coincidence, Gerald Schild was leaving at the same time. Graham, as he had come to be in the habit of doing, was seeing that he did. (Only by hiding Rosalyn and presenting the bold face of Graham alone could Schild ever be brought to leave.) The four of them, Tate, Submit, Graham, and Schild, all stopped outside the front door, as if surprised by the strangeness of fate in providing such accidental groupings.

  An almost irresistible temptation called to Graham as he made introductions: This is my lawyer for a false paternity suit. This is my mistress’s husband. And here, my dead guardian’s wife, a woman for whom I would give both testes in toto for the pleasure of sleeping with for just one night.

  After more decent amenities, Tate shook the American’s offered hand, while further mumblings conveyed that introductions between Submit
and Schild were unnecessary. They had met before in London, at Schild’s own house. Graham knew a horrible jealous pang of a moment before he realized that, of course, Rosalyn’s house in London was also Gerald’s, and that he had met the widow there on one of his brief, shadowy visits to his wife. The two of them nodded at this connection.

  Still, there was something less easily dismissed that passed between Gerald Schild and Submit, Graham thought. Even before they had attached faces and names to place and reason for familiarity, there was a recognition: two privateers hailing each other in passing. They were both outsiders to everything on the inside of this house. They each knew it and acknowledged it in the other, making the nod and the connection into something more. Then Submit was ascending the front stairs on Tate’s arm (Tate, the flagship now leading his pinnace to foreign harbor).